Greetings and salutations! I am MolarTron, a plaque-fighting superhero from Planet Molar X!
I have come to Earth to help you and your children fight my very dangerous nemesis, the one and only Dee Kay. Dee Kay is a big mean bully who harasses innocent little baby teeth when they eat sugary treats, and my friends and I have devoted ourselves to help you humans get rid of the bullying gang of plaque germs once and for all.
The author who created me, Susan F. Urell, has been a plaque fighter since 1985 when she graduated from dental hygiene school in Dayton, Ohio.
Actually, Suzi (as most people call her) began fighting plaque and other crimes of the mouth when she was sixteen and worked in her dad’s dental office! She comes from a long line of dentists! Her dad, her brother, two uncles, and two cousins are all dentists. Suzi didn’t want to be a dental hygienist at first because she wanted to be a flight attendant and date foreign men, but after getting rejected by the airlines for being overweight, she took her dad’s advice.
“Go be a dental hygienist and then you can go see the world!” her dad told her, and that is precisely what she did! Suzi is a very practical person and figured she would always have a job as a dental hygienist, which could fund all of her adventures! The day after college graduation she packed her dog in the car and drove to San Francisco, sight unseen!
Fourteen years into her practice, she thought she had seen it all. She had the screamers in the chair, the PIA’s (pains in “rear”) kids who were very badly behaved, and the squirmers! For those kids, if the parent stayed out of the operatory and waited out in the waiting room, the kids usually did better and turned themselves around fairly quickly. Suzi had this one little girl that screamed for two straight years, every six months, until finally the girl matured enough to let Suzi do a cleaning! Finally! Success!
Shortly thereafter, on this one particular afternoon, in a grocery store aisle, Suzi heard a stranger who was about to change her life.
As she walked by this woman and her crying youngster, she overheard the woman sternly say to this child, with the index finger pointed in the child’s face, “If you don’t stop it, I’m taking you to the DENTIST!”
Those words brought Suzi’s cereal shopping to a screeching halt.
Dentistry as punishment?!
Suzi had seen varying degrees of fear before in the office, but she had never witnessed the tragic beating down of a four year old innocent dental spirit like she did that day in aisle 7, which in turn deeply touched her own spirit. In short, she had a quick conversation with this mother where Suzi suggested that she consider threatening her child with a “time-out” instead of threatening her with her dental health for perhaps the rest of the child’s life!
Let’s face it! No one equates “fun and entertaining” with DENTISTRY!!!! (Not yet, anyway!) But punishment? That was way more than Suzi could accept. She could only imagine that one day, when confronted by a looming dental appointment, that little girl may NEVER willingly step foot in a dental office! She may never even know why she gets so upset about dental visits once she grows up. Suzi’s heart truly went out to that little girl and others like her. She went home and could not sleep.
By midnight Suzi had decided her new mission in dentistry would be to demystify the formal dental experience for children like that girl (and their nervous, frightened grown-ups!) via fun, goofy, musical, happy, informative entertainment! Entertainment was the only way Suzi could imagine having a shot at redirecting negative beliefs and perceptions. Laughter really is the best medicine, right?!
So that night Suzi created me, MolarTron, and my world on Planet Molar X. Actually, I was called Toofus back then! She created all my friends, like Flossie Floss’riguez (Flossie’s a floss fairy and she’s my best friend. I’m crushing on Flossie SO BADLY! But sssshhh!!! It’s a secret!).
That night when I was born, Suzi wrote me into a goofy book about getting a cavity and the procedure to fix it. She kept writing. She wrote another book about how to brush if you’re a toddler. Then she wrote a sing-a-long about how to floss! She wrote about the Sleep Fairy who puts lips and tongues and teeth to sleep. She wrote about what it’s like to get your teeth cleaned. She wrote about the pet hamster whose teeth grow too long and he can’t eat. She wrote about odd patterns of permanent tooth eruptions. She wrote about the office noises, smells, tastes, and sensations.
Suzi went out into the schools and found ideas, inspiration, and encouragememtn from the students and from her young patients to keep pushing ahead with “MolarTron & friends!” Suzi discovered that she loved acting and “edu-taining.”
Suzi moved to Florida to help her mom start a new dental employment business, and while she was there she became a professional plus-size model and TV commercial actress after hearing a casting call on the radio! This is Suzi in an ad for Sears turtlenecks and jeans!
She had a good seven-year run and was able to join the Screen Actors Guild!
After her mom got settled in the dental employment business, Suzi moved to Los Angeles to see if she could be an actress in Hollywood! Her timing was terrible! She moved right before the September 11 attacks, and most of Hollywood shut down. At the same time, Suzi had met a literary agent who shopped our first book, DEE KAY STRIKES AGAIN!, around to nineteen publishers. Most of them sent back very nice rejection letters. No one was doing anything then. I was put on the back burner for a while.
In 2009, Suzi was happily working as a dental hygienist in Burbank, California. Life was good, the patients were cool people who worked in the movie and TV business at the studios nearby, some of the patients had a lot of star power, and her income was strong and steady. That’s when she went to hear Anthony Robbins speak, and ended up walking across a bunch of hot burning coals. Now I was sleeping on the shelf on my homeworld, Planet Molar X, so I didn’t actually see her walk across a bed of hot burning coals. However, I did see the pictures online on Tony’s website and thought it was pretty cool of her to do that.
Well, after becoming an official “firewalker,” Suzi decided to pull me and our children’s dental health edutainment books, called The Adventures of Toofus! off the shelf and actually do something with them! Suzi hired a “team” of kids and professionals to read and critique each book to be sure the kids would like me. She paid the kids $5.00 each to fill out a questionnaire, and she took all their comments very seriously. Five year old Niki designed the costume for Flossie Floss’riguez.
Eight year old Izaak suggested a rainbow toothbrush, so Suzi put Rainbow Bristle Beast in the brushing book. Suzi always says that “MolarTron is for the kids, by the kids!”
Suzi figured if she could walk across hot burning coals (and train her brain to protect her body from getting burned), well then, she could do anything she set her mind to doing. In 2009 she wanted to be a writer.
Low and behold, in the time that she wrote and copyrighted our early Toofus stories until the time she decided to make a go of being a bonafide writer, someone had actually acquired a trademark on the name TOOFUS! We were like, “WHAT THE HECK?” It felt as if someone had pulled the rug out from under us, because way back in 1999 when Suzi first created me and bought the Toofus domain name, there was barely a peep of my name, Toofus, anywhere on the internet. Ten years later, the name is everywhere out there!
Ahhh well…after grieving the loss of not being able to use my actual name in commerce, we had a sit down. We cried. We laughed. We ate Chinese food (I just love Earthling egg rolls!). We brainstormed. We cried some more. We brainstormed some more. I tried out different names, such as Enamel Man, Toothus, Enamelus, and Molar Man (already taken!). After a few days of sleeping on it, we ran a name search in the trademark office, and finally decided that my new name would be MolarTron!
MolarTron!
It sounded like a video game you’d play in a dental office waiting room! >Molar… TRON!<
I was totally feelin’ it. MolarTRONNNNN!!! Watch out, Plaque Bacterians! Here comes MolarTron! Dee Kay, your days are numbered!! I’m MOLARTRON!
Yeah! MolarTron sounded contemporary and modern and neon lights and new millennium-ish and way cooler than my more juvenile name, Toofus! I became MolarTron and I liked it!
So, E.L. Benson, my illustrator, revved up my steel arm and made one of them morph into a dental drill! Then he made my other steel arm morph into a dental mirror! I was ready for action!
Suzi and I promptly self-published our first MolarTron book called MolarTron & Friends! Fighters of Plaque and Other Crimes of the Mouth! Starring L’il Mo! We secured a trademark on my name. Life was good. Suzi had that groovy dental hygiene job near the studios and was making a decent-enough living that she could afford me as a new business. We made a web page. We started a publishing company so we could produce a series of MolarTron books and DVDs! We planned to promote good oral hygiene and dental health education in an entertaining and memorable way, and on a global scale! Flossie Floss’riguez and Bristle Beast were so excited, too!
Things were going great! We were on a quest to empower kids with knowledge!
On the personal side, Suzi, who was pretty much always overweight most of her life, had a hot younger guy and was falling in love. Oh man! They were so cute together! Plus she was working out with a personal trainer three times a week and felt good. She lived in a nice place in Studio City. She wasn’t even grinding her teeth so much at night anymore. Stress was low! And we were having a blast with our friends in Los Angeles! We loved helping the Kid’s Community Dental Clinic in Burbank with their events. What a great bunch of people who help children, and they do it with so much love. With the help of the Clinic we got to hang out with the Burbank Fire Department on Fire Service Day!
Then, the recession hit. All hell broke loose, right?
As the economy took a dive, Suzi was involved in a freak accident with her car trunk, which slammed down on her arm and crushed her radial nerve (This was on top of the previous two car accidents where she was rear-ended in 1999 and T-boned in 2006!).
Whiplash and freaky car accidents are not good for a dental hygienist with 24 years of experience under her belt!
Needless to say, Suzi was on disability for over a year while her radial nerve healed, and she had to give up her groovy job in Burbank because she was going to be gone from work for a long time. Several different doctors suggested it was time to consider working in another profession that didn’t tax her shoulders and neck.
Meanwhile, in between bi-weekly painful physical therapy sessions and sitting at home not feeling well, Suzi and I passed the time by trying new recipes and eating entirely waaaaay too many baked goods!
But anyway, after the arm injury, Suzi had to drop her personal trainer and stop working out for a while, because it was too painful to exercise (and since she wasn’t working anymore it became too expensive anyway). Well, talk about trying new recipes! Not working, not working out, over-eating, and feeling a lil sorry for herself was a recipe for depression and disaster! In two years Suzi gained 60 pounds on her already chunkified frame.
But she was still writing stories for me, still proceeding forward with all the legal necessities to protect me and our designs and our songs, and we were still clicking right along. I don’t know how she did it. She was unstoppable.
Then her hot younger man-friend told her that he didn’t like that she gained so much weight, and he told her that he wasn’t attracted to her so much anymore. Awwww. She cried and cried. We ate some more egg rolls. Who wouldn’t be upset? She had lost not just her job but probably her 24 year long CAREER as a dental hygienist, she was losing her hot guy because the daily pints of ice cream were winning and she was not working out, her savings account was dwindling so she moved us into a cheaper apartment in Valley Village with a partial view of the dumpsters, she was approaching the age of 50, and she was in chronic pain every day! Awwww. Owie. No wonder she wanted her mommy!
So, six months after moving to that cheaper place, Suzi took me and our cat, BB, to her hometown of Columbus, Ohio to live with her mom! That was a lot of moving! Suzi began seeing a family doctor for her injuries. She still wasn’t working out or excercising much at all. And she wasn’t writing books about me and my Planet Molar X friends, either. She wasn’t doing much of anything constructive for us but at least for herself she went to therapy. So I cheered her on! Flossie Floss’riguez gave her some pink lip gloss. And Bristle Beast let her win at checkers.
It got pretty bad there for a while. Suzi had to make a payment plan to finish paying for our website. She owed lots of money to her attorney, too! Suzi even sold her jewelry to make ends meet and keep me going! She sold just about everything valuable that she had. “It’s only stuff,” she told me, “but I still have YOU, MolarTron! And you give me a reason to get up every morning. YOU give me a sense of purpose in life, MolarTron.” she has always told me. Awwwww. Her devotion made me feel so good! I didn’t mind hanging out on the shelf after that! As long as she believed in our dream of empowering children, I knew she could fight off depression. I knew she would find some money somehow, and we would be able to continue our fight against Dee Kay and other problems!
So, we stayed with Suzi’s mom in Columbus. Credit scores can eventually get fixed, right?! And seven years will FLY by even if you’re not having fun, don’t you think?! I mean, can you believe it’s September, 2012 already? Hopefully, we’ll all get tax refunds this year and Suzi can pay off the creditors! And then she can produce the next music video for You Tube about how Dee Kay causes cavities! And then she can pay Erik to draw more pictures for our flagship book, DEE KAY STRIKES AGAIN! And then she can make the “MolarTron Musical: Diabetes Prevention” for school assemblies (it’s already written and partially illustrated). We’re ready to go but it’s really hard for Suzi to be the creator, producer, director, financier, marketing and sales staff, administration staff, and publisher on 70% less income than when we started. I honestly don’t know how she does it. She tells me I’m her passion! She tells me maybe she is channeling this information from a higher place. She said she can’t stop! She is compelled to keep going and contribute to the greater good. Suzi is determined to help children get and stay healthy! Flossie and I feel badly that her love for us (and her belief in us) has practically bankrupted her, but she tells us that one day, we will for sure make a difference!
Hey! We’re finally off of food assistance and we have our own apartment again! Suzi has finally healed enough to go back to work parttime as a dental hygienist. She’s also losing weight and blogging about it here:
www.susanurell.blogspot.com
She wants to lose that 60 pounds she gained plus the extra 40 that was there before all the crazy stuff started happening! She said, “How can I lead the kids to better health when mine is so out of control?” I tell ya, it’s not easy to resist all the SUGAR stockpiles that exist all over Earth. That’s one reason I am here. I want to help kids learn all about the hazards of sugar! It can hurt teeth AND hurt human bodies.
I’m just happy that Suzi is coming around now and is sitting at the computer to write again, so that is a good sign! She is also taking me out to schools with her and educating your human kids! It always makes me feel better when she is writing and teaching! I couldn’t wait to get off that shelf and get out here to help Earth children and their pets fight plaque and other crimes of the mouth!
I was born for this! Yiiipppeee kiiii yayyy!!! You better watch out, Dee Kay! Toofus is all grown up and now MolarTron is coming for you!
Love,
MolarTron
xoxoxoxoxoxox
